Science in the Kitchen. eBook

dish in the most elaborate manner, until, in many
households, the cooking of food has come to be almost
the chief end of life. While the preparation of
food should be looked upon as of so much importance
as to demand the most careful consideration and thought
as to its suitability, wholesomeness, nutritive qualities,
and digestibility, it should by no means be made to
usurp the larger share of one’s time, when simpler
foods and less labor would afford the partakers equal
nourishment and strength.

A great variety of foods at one meal exerts a potent
influence in creating a love of eating, and is likewise
a constant temptation to overeat. Let us have
well-cooked, nutritious, and palatable food, and plenty
of it; variety from day to day, but not too great a
variety at each meal.

The prevalent custom of loading the table with a great
number of viands, upon occasions when guests are to
be entertained in our homes, is one to be deplored,
since it is neither conducive to good health nor necessary
to good cheer, but on the contrary is still laborious
and expensive a practice that many are debarred from
social intercourse because they cannot afford to entertain
after the fashion of their neighbors. Upon this
subject a well-known writer has aptly said: “Simplify
cookery, thus reducing the cost of living, and how
many longing individuals would thereby be enabled
to afford themselves the pleasure of culture and social
intercourse! When the barbarous practice of stuffing
one’s guests shall have been abolished, a social
gathering will not then imply, as it does now, hard
labor, expensive outlay, and dyspepsia. Perhaps
when that time arise, we shall be sufficiently civilized
to demand pleasures of a higher sort. True, the
entertainments will then, in one sense, be more costly,
as culture is harder to come by than cake. The
profusion of viands now heaped upon the table, betrays
poverty of the worst sort. Having nothing better
to offer, we offer victuals; and this we do with something
of that complacent, satisfied air with which some more
northern tribes present their tidbits of whale and
walrus.”

TABLE TOPICS.

“Let appetite wear reason’s
golden chain,
and find in due restrain its
luxury.”

A man’s food, when he has the
means and opportunity of selecting it, suggests
his moral nature. Many a Christian is trying to
do by prayer that which cannot be done except
through corrected diet.—­Talmage.

Our pious ancestors enacted a law that
suicides should be buried where four roads meet,
and that a cart-load of stones should be thrown
upon the body. Yet, when gentlemen or ladies commit
suicide, not by cord or steel, but by turtle soup
or lobster salad, they may be buried on consecrated
ground, and the public are not ashamed to read
an epitaph upon their tombstones false enough to make
the marble blush.—­Horace Mann.